The performance properties of plastic products are the objective of plastic engineering. Overall, the engineering activities can be divided in three different engineering activities, which are commonly done separately in different organizations or companies. Material suppliers normally optimize the material and apply the tailoring of the material recipe to application needs. The quality engineering converts the optimized materials under optimized processing conditions. The original equipment manufacturers (OEM) are responsible for the product quality and the functionality of the part produced. By means of application engineering the performance properties of the product is determined.
Plastic is the general term for a wide range of synthetic or semi synthetic polymerization products. Generally, such products are producible by polymerization reactions, namely addition polymerization or condensation polymerization, and may contain other substances to improve performance or reduce costs.
Thereby a polymer is a substance composed of molecules composed of repeating structural units, or so called monomers connected by covalent chemical bonds. Well known examples of polymers include plastics, DNA and proteins. Simple and known examples may further be polypropylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polystyrol, polyvinylchloride (PVC), polytetrafluorethylen (PTFE), polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), polyamide (PA), polycarbonate (PC), polyethylenterephthalat (PET). Depending on the application needs, a plastic material is tailored by means of different constituents and adapted proportions of these constituents. Often a polymer is processed with one or more additional substances or additives. These substances may be used as dissolved or not dissolved (pure) additions to the polymer. In case of dissolved additives, the solvent is called a masterbatch. Also these masterbatches may determine and influence the properties of the material that is to be produced. These masterbatches may by themselves be a polymer and any state like solid state, liquid state or gaseous state is used during industrial plastic production. Furthermore more than one masterbatch may define a final recipe of a masterbatch.